About.

I'm Josh, founder of Hill Studio. I design naturalistic gardens across Melbourne and the Dandenong Ranges; gardens that are layered, alive, and made to look better as they evolve.

A good garden, to me, isn't the one that looks finished on day one. It's the one that's considered every plant chosen for that site, that light, that climate, and left to settle and fill in until it feels like it was always there. Naturalistic doesn't mean wild. It means intentional. That's the whole idea behind Hill Studio.

I came to it honestly. Plants were in my family before they were my job, my poppa started a nursery, and I knew plant names before I really knew what I was being handed. I grew up in the Ranges learning the rest the only way that sticks: living in it. What the frost kills, which corners never see sun, what lasts and what quietly dies its first winter. Later I trained at Burnley, the horticulture school behind many of Australia's most respected designers/horticulturists so the instinct I grew up with is now backed by a real understanding of soil, ecology, and how a garden lives once you've walked away from it.

That foundation goes into every garden I design, wherever it is. An inner-east courtyard, a family backyard, a hillside block in the hills — the thinking doesn't change. I read the place honestly, then plant what belongs there, so what goes in the ground actually thrives instead of limping through its first summer.